With the advent of the computer and particularly the networking of computers, the ability of organisations and individuals to rapidly generate, store, access and process data has increased dramatically. In the case of many organisations, the ability to manage and leverage data has become a central aspect of their business.
Not surprisingly, considerable effort and development has occurred in those computational and software fields related to the generation, storage, accessibility and processing of data. Nevertheless, it has been the case that as organisations have moved to a distributed architecture paralleling the development of the Internet, the complexity involved in providing solutions across different platforms and operating systems has become ever more challenging. Consequently, developers have tended to concentrate on limited solutions for preferred platforms and operating systems. Similarly, organisations have sought to standardise the tools they use to leverage data.
Unfortunately, the pull exerted by those distributed computing models currently finding favour is in direct contradiction to the solutions adopted by the majority of developers and those responsible within organisations for the selection of tools. Consequently, the management and distribution of data, particular of high value media content remains problematic.